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Case Study 3: Hannah

Real-world examples of teachers conducting relatively small-scale research into their practice.
Hannah is a History Teacher and Assistant Year Head in a secondary school. As part of her role, she has an interest in and responsibility for supporting ‘pupil premium’ students in terms of their attitudes towards education and achievement. As part of her masters dissertation supervised by Dr Sarah Hall, she used a range of interventions such as behaviour management small group sessions, revision groups and more subtle practices of raising aspirations and role modelling.

As Hannah describes, she wished to “gain both staff and pupil responses and understandings of school-based intervention” focused on students’ attitudes towards education and achievement. Furthermore, she says “the research design needed to allow participants an opportunity to express personal opinions and experiences rather than being solely reliant on exam-based data and results… The use of interviews and questionnaires was deemed to be appropriate to further explore personal attitudes of both staff members and pupils at my school in the confines of a small-scale research study. I wanted to compare the personal responses from both staff and pupils to see if there was correlation between their ideas. By exploring the attitudes that pupils have towards school-based intervention I would then, in turn, be able to assess their effectiveness from a teacher perspective.”
© University of Birmingham and Chartered College of Teaching
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Education Research that Matters: Doing Research in Your Learning Community

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